


Reparations

by ashkatom



Series: OLOHverse [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Body Horror, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-21
Updated: 2014-06-21
Packaged: 2018-02-05 13:47:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1820536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashkatom/pseuds/ashkatom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Vriska</em>, you think, and then, more heatedly, <em>Vriska Serket, you fucked up</em>. You haven’t killed before. You’ve been lucky, since you live so far away from everyone else and anybody else with access to you has decided that you’re not worth messing with. But half of you is gone forever, now, and it took any scruples you had with it. Vriska Serket is at the top of your to-kill list, now, and you’re not going to let her name languish there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reparations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [temporalDecay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporalDecay/gifts).



> Hello for the first time in a while! Have some words, and also [a link to the song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGMWL8cOeAU).

_Maybe you're looking for someone to blame_  
 _Fighting for air while you circle the drain_  
 _Never be sorry for your little time_  
 _It's not when you get there, it's always the climb_

\--

You know there’s something wrong with the first breath you draw when you wake up. It pulls through you and rasps against your throat, but you don’t _feel_ it. A moment later you exhale, the air sucked out of you, and in a panic you try to interrupt the cycle and haul your breath back in.

It works. You slow down your breathing again, dizzy and disoriented and still utterly convinced that something is wrong, and try to sit up.

You’re strapped to a table. Okay. Okay, fine, you can - you have to pause to determinedly swallow down the tide of panic rising up again, but you are Aradia Megido, tomb robber and FLARP veteran, and you have been in worse situations - you can deal with this.

“Hello?” you try to call. The dryness of your throat makes you start coughing instead, and you have reason to be glad that you’re restrained so you don’t fall off. Someone runs up to you and holds your head still with cool hands, and when you’re done you open your eyes and squint through automatic tears only to come face-to-face with the Heiress.

“Oh, Gl’bgolyb,” you say, in a horrified whisper.

“No, just me!” the Heiress says.

You can feel the shriek rising in your throat as you strain against the straps holding you down, but they’re all solid as rocks and your psi keeps slipping through your fingers when you reach for it, too disoriented still to tear your way free. Seadwellers will cut you up and eat you for breakfast, and this one will share leftovers with her lusus. You wanted to die in a dashing and explosive way, not like this.

You squeeze your eyes shut and concentrate. Across the room, something smashes into a wall. The Heiress’ hands jump on your skin, and she asks, “Was that _you_?” When you don’t answer, she paps your face awkwardly, smushing your nose a little. “I’m not going to krill you, shelly!”

“Let me go, then,” you say. Something glass breaks a bit closer to the two of you, and you redouble your concentration. “I’ll take you down with me!”

“I can’t, Equius said you shoald rest, he and Sole-lux are both-”

“ _What have you done to Sollux_?” you shriek, and finally the Heiress steps back. As soon as you heard his name - however mangled - a pit of gloom deposited itself in your stomach, and you have the feeling that whatever caused you to wake up strapped to a table in a seadweller’s basement hurt Sollux too.

The Heiress steps back when you open your eyes to snarl at her properly, and then takes another step towards the door. “He- Isle go get him,” she says, and runs out the door with the tails of her skirt fluttering behind her like fins. You watch her go, upside-down because you can’t see her any other way, and seethe.

\--

When Sollux stumbles in, he’s still got sopor slime in his hair and his glasses are crooked, which makes you feel a lot better about being strapped to a table in the Heiress’s basement. When he gets to your side, he reaches out like he’s about to smooth his thumb across your cheek and then snatches his hand back guiltily.

“Sollux?” you ask.

He scrubs at an eye with his wrist, shoving away his glasses in the process, and your sense of alarm ratchets up. He’s got patchy yellow smudges under his eyes, and he looks... older, somehow. You don’t know what happened while you were out, but it wasn’t good if it affected your nerd of a moirail like this.

“What happened?” you whisper.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and steps back to undo the straps around your ankles. “I’m so sorry, AA.”

“Why are we here?” you ask, flexing your toes as the straps come free. “With the Heiress- the _Heiress_ , how deep is the shit we’re in?”

Sollux’s only answer is to undo the rest of the straps. Before you can sit up he says, “AA, I- You haven’t seen, you’re not-”

“Not _what_?” you demand, and sit up.

Your first look at yourself makes you fall off the table.

You clatter, now, instead of the solid, meaty thunk you used to have when you fell off things. Not that falling off things was a habit - at least, you tried your best to not make it one - but ancient tombs aren’t exactly known for their solid footing, so you’re pretty familiar with what you sound like, hitting the ground.

You hold your hands up in front of your face, one articulated metal and one bone and flesh. They both wriggle their fingers when you tell them to.

“I think you’d better tell me what happened,” you say to Sollux.

\--

You feel as old as Sollux looks, and as wrung-out, too. You also can’t stop watching your new hand flex its fingers at your command, or smoothing your real hand along the curves of interlocking metal that keep your guts in. Now that you’ve had some time awake, you can tell where flesh-you ends and metal-you begins. Your own limbs are a lot more tired than your steel ones, which spring readily and eagerly to your command, and will whether or not you strictly want them to.

“I’m sorry,” Sollux says again, his voice as thin as paper. He hasn’t been able to look you in the eye once, and he keeps apologising whenever you don’t fill any silence he provides. “I- I’ll go, I won’t- I mean, EQ can take it from here, you don’t have to- I was the only one who could-” He runs out of steam and hunches into himself, shoulders around his ears. “I’ll go.”

You look down at your hands and try to imagine Sollux killing you. It’s so impossible that you have to keep forcing yourself back to the thought.

Sollux climbs to his feet when you don’t reply, stumbling a little with bone-deep weariness. He probably hasn’t slept much, since you don’t think it’s been that long since you -

_died_

\- almost died, despite the fact that you have a whole new body. Sollux doesn’t rest when he’s coding a dumb virus to hateflirt with Karkat, so you doubt he would have rested during this ordeal of a challenge.

You look at your hand again. Open, close. Your fingers glitter in the harsh lighting of this room.

“It’s not your fault,” you say, finally. Your voice is still hoarse because you almost died and nobody’s gotten you a drink yet. The service here sucks. Sollux stops, but this time he’s the one that lets the silence spin out. “Sollux,” you say, and there is a tremble in your voice that you’ve never heard before. “If you leave me alone here, I’m going to punch the Heiress in the face and she’s going to eat me.”

He sinks back down to his heels beside you all in one fluid movement and wraps his arms around your shoulders, clinging to you so tightly that you’d be in danger of losing an arm if you hadn’t already. You squeeze your arms around him, careful of the new one and its strength, close your eyes, and let a few tears trickle into his shirt.

_Vriska_ , you think, and then, more heatedly, _Vriska Serket, you fucked up_. You haven’t killed before. You’ve been lucky, since you live so far away from everyone else and anybody else with access to you has decided that you’re not worth messing with. But half of you is gone forever, now, and it took any scruples you had with it. Vriska Serket is at the top of your to-kill list, now, and you’re not going to let her name languish there.

\--

There’s a big blueblood named Equius who sweats when you thank him, one of Karkat’s friends-of-friends from what you can gather. You don’t know what kind of favours Karkat had to call in or promise to get you all this help, and he’s definitely going to get a horrible squishy hug from you the next time you see him, the sap. The Heiress is named Feferi, although you edge away from her as soon as you politely can, given that you don’t think being half-metal would be much of a deterrent for her lusus, eating you. Eridan is the missing link in the puzzle, sulking in the corner. You’ve only met him once or twice, through FLARP-

_with Vriska_ , your stomach turns and you have to press a hand to your mouth, but he helped, he _helped_ , he and Vriska were over long ago and _he helped you_

-but his fins pick up when you join the Sulking Corner and thank him for his help in making sure that you survived.

“You fuckin’ weak-ass lowbloods are always dyin’, anyway,” he says, shrugging a shoulder under his cape and trying to play it off.

“Say that again, I dare you,” you tell him, and beam at Feferi’s suspicious look from a room away. The Sulking Corner is very sound-dampening. All the while, your mind ticks away, planning Vriska’s demise.

You haven’t gotten very far. You keep running up against the wall of ‘mostly-infallible lowblood mind control,’ which is a hard wall to break through. It was dumb of her to use Sollux against you, but she wanted you to suffer before you died, and her slip-up means that you’ll get to do the same, even if you can’t figure out how just yet.

She was scared of you for a reason.

You touch Sollux on the arm when he comes back to you from wrapping things up with Equius. “Can we leave?”

He wants to swaddle you, you can tell, wrap you up in cotton wool and keep you safe from dangers. You raise an eyebrow at him, just a tad, because you woke up feeling a lot more okay than he does and now all you want is to go to sleep until you’re the rest of the way there. You’ll probably freak out properly about your body tomorrow, when it’s had a chance to sink in, but you want that to happen at - well, at Sollux’s home, since you don’t have one now.

He folds like a bad hand of cards. He’ll probably be obeying your every whim for the next five sweeps, if you let him. Right now, tired and cold, you’re inclined to. “Yeah, of course,” he says, his lisp messing up his speech even more than it normally does. He needs sleep as much as you do.

Feferi swims up with the two of you, towing Sollux along by the wrist and blowing bubbles in his face when his style of swimming turns out to be more along the lines of flailing. You’re fine, kicking and pulling yourself along with a body that will never falter. You have to go slowly, with a breather strapped over your mouth and nose, because Feferi’s hive is so far down you’re surprised you didn’t run into her horrorterror of a lusus. Still, when you break surface, your now-short hair plastered to your face, it’s a sweet moment.

The sand of the beach Feferi brought you to is too densely packed to slip under your feet, but you can feel stabilisers in your leg working away nonetheless, giving you perfect balance - on one leg, at least.

“My hive?” Sollux asks, staring at the ground.

“Where else would I go?” you ask, unintentionally letting some nastiness slip in. He flinches, and the guilt hits you straight away. Not his fault. You decided that it was not his fault, no matter how frustrated you are, so you temper it by slipping your hand in his and squeezing twice. “Yes, your hive.”

He shifts his weight to one foot before warily looking up at Feferi. “FF, thanks.”

“Naut a problem,” she says, cupping her elbows in her hands and looking up at Sollux through her lashes. You resist the urge to gag, but are glad to turn away and start walking nonetheless, which only makes it all the more upsetting when Feferi calls out, “Araydia, wait!”

You stop and turn back, because you didn’t expect Feferi to know your name, let alone want to talk to you beyond the necessary.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and holds out a hand to you. You blink at her, and she thrusts her hand further towards you, awkwardly. “I shoaldn’t have- Alternia is my responseability. So I’m sorry.”

After a long moment, you reach out and take her hand, because her heart is in the right place and that’s surprising enough. But then you say, “Highbloods hunt us, Heiress,” and squeeze her fingers until they go bone-white near your grip. “That’s all Vriska did to me.”

To her credit, she doesn’t flinch as you tighten your fingers. She meets your eye, level and poised, and says, “I know. But it’s still wrong.”

“Sorry’s not enough.” You shake Sollux off your other arm so that you can tap yourself on the chest. “Saving poor little rustblood Aradia doesn’t make up for everything.” Karkat hides himself in grey, Sollux pushes himself to be good enough to not cull, Tavros is - Tavros is fighting a death sentence, now, and you too, and Feferi will never, _never_ understand. You let a little of the rage at Vriska boiling inside you come to your eyes. “It’s _not enough_.”

Feferi’s mouth thins out into a determined line. “It’s still wrong.”

You hold her gaze a moment, then drop her hand. “Sure is,” you say, and turn away with a tired wave over your shoulder. “Tell me if it ever changes, Heiress.”

Sollux, eyes wide and flaring in a pale face, has to be prodded twice to fly you, because you can’t manage it right now.

\--

Sollux’s hive is colder than it normally is, darker. The bees are sluggish to greet you, and you don’t notice the faint whir of all his computers missing until he starts turning them back on. Things have gone cold and awkward between the two of you again, probably because you didn’t toe the line and keep your head down with Feferi, while he was twisted around her little finger.

“You don’t need sopor now,” he says, when you move towards the respiteblock.

You stop and press your hands to your skin. “Oh,” you manage to get out, your voice wobbling. “I’m-” you have to stop and ruthlessly kick the wobble in its shins, “-waterproof, though.”

He blinks at you, then says, “Yeah. Did you-?”

“I want a cupe,” you say. You can’t help the miserable escalation in volume now that you’re alone and so, so close to being able to close your eyes in a safe place and pretend this is all a bad dream. “I want a cupe, I want to go to sleep, and I want my moirail to stop treating me like spun glass, Sollux!”

He looks like a kicked barkbeast. “Sorry,” he whispers, then clears his throat. “I. Sorry.”

You march away and bury yourself in the red side of his cupe before he can apologise again.

\--

You’re woken up too early, of course, for all that you’re normally an early riser. Sollux is hauling you out of the cupe by your arm, but it’s the wrong one and sopor slime leaves the metal too slick for him to get a proper grip.

“Whazzng?” you say, and try to pat his face.

“We have to _go_ , AA, come on, we have to go before she realises-”

You snap awake and tumble the rest of the way out of the cupe on your own, panic making you slip over and have to struggle your way upright. “Vriska? How does she _know-_ ”

“Terezi,” Sollux pants, and hauls on your arm. “Come on, we can outfly her fucking lusus, let’s _move_ -”

You stop, catching hold of the cupe so Sollux stops too, drawn up short by your arm. “ _Terezi_?”

You don’t know Terezi as well as you should, considering that she’s a Scourge Sister. Vriska’s always been louder, more flamboyant about being in charge (although you doubt it, with what you _do_ know of Terezi), and very good at making sure that the attention stays on her. You don’t even know why Vriska and Terezi teamed up, although the fact that every word between them is dripping with hate is a big factor in your guessing.

You don’t know why Terezi would have come to you, now that Vriska has declared you persona non grata, to put it politely. The very fact that she let Sollux see her means that she knows that you know she’s there.

“I’m going to talk to her,” you say, and walk the other way, back towards the door. Sollux trails in your wake as you square your shoulders and raise your chin, ready to take anyone who can’t control you defenseless. There’s a chance that Vriska’s off hiding somewhere, ready for a Team Scourge kill, but Sollux is backing you up, and even Vriska learns to avoid pain when she can help it.

“I can’t fucking believe this,” Sollux says. “You’re going to _talk_ -”

You yank open the door and Sollux stutters into silence. All you can do is stare, caught short by Terezi’s appearance.

“Is this any way to greet a guest?” Terezi says to your extended silence. Her skin is inflamed, tight and swollen, her hands wrapped painfully around the head of one of her canes. She reaches up with it and taps you on the chest, momentarily taken aback by the _whunk_ she gets. “Aradia?”

“What _happened_?” you ask. It _looks_ like the worst sunburn you’ve ever seen, but even Terezi isn’t foolhardy enough to go out into full-force sunshine.

She lowers her glasses, and you raise a hand to your mouth to cover the expression of horror that’s pasted itself across your face, no matter that she can’t see it. Behind you, Sollux says, “ _Shit_ ,” and Terezi nods before painfully resettling her glasses - her _Redglare_ glasses, sickeningly appropriate now - and placing her hand back on her cane.

“Vriska happened,” she said. “May I come in?”

\--

She sits, carefully, in Sollux’s computer chair. She made it on her own though, however slowly, so you treat her as you always would.

When you fold your arms, the plating on your metal one pinches the skin of your flesh one, and you swear. Terezi turns her head towards you, minutely, her gaze somewhere over your shoulder, but you start talking before she can ask how you’re alive. “Is Vriska following you?”

The corners of Terezi’s mouth turn down. “No.”

You wait, but she doesn’t say anything else. “What brings you here, then?”

She hesitates. “I was looking for Sollux.”

You twist and look at Sollux. He shrugs and shakes his head.

“Why?” you ask, turning back to face Terezi. “You know what Vriska did to me, Scourge. Sollux was hardly likely to welcome you in.”

“I know,” she says, and makes a fumbling gesture at the air. Only when it lights up do you realise she was attempting to access her modus.

An arm, torn off at the shoulder and leaking cerulean, falls onto the floor between you.

Your stomach turns, but you breathe through your mouth and try to not taste the smell of blood that’s laid itself thick on the air. You’ve found bones before. This is just a bone that’s not finished, yet.

“I hoped,” Terezi said, biting off each word precisely, “to offer reparations.”

“Is that-?” you ask.

“Vriska’s.” Terezi smiles, a ghost of the shark-toothed grin that you’re used to seeing. “I think I made her angry.”

“She can’t control you,” Sollux says. You almost forgot he was there. “Fuck your reparations, TZ, what kind of game are you playing?”

She straightens, painfully. Her skin is so bright and angry that it hurts you just to look at. “She can’t control me, no,” she confirms. She’s looking over Sollux’s head, teeth bared. “She can control Tavros, who can control Pyralspite, who has spoken to me in my dreams since I was a _grub_ and she was an _egg_. And she had the incentive, because I meted out justice inefficiently, and now I am attempting to fix my mistake.” She nudges Vriska’s arm with the tip of her cane, and sneers. “I think we’re past games, now - don’t you, Aradia?”

“You should have killed her,” you say, staring at Vriska’s arm. A part of you is horrified by what you’re saying, but as Terezi said, you’re past games. “You just pissed her off.” It takes you a moment to drag your gaze away from the arm on the floor, but then - “Tavros?” you demand. “She knows where Tavros _is_?”

“Yes,” Terezi says.

 You’ve been manipulated before. Everyone who knows the name ‘Vriska Serket’ has been manipulated before, and you’re no excuse. But you’ve never been manipulated like this, with every end neatly folded in and taped down, given your means, motive, and-

“Does she know that I made it?”

“Not yet, I think,” Terezi says, utterly unrepentant. You feel watched, despite the fact that she’s blind. “I distracted her.”

-Opportunity.

You begin to understand why Terezi and Vriska hate each other.

You sit down against the wall and press your hands to your face. Sollux rests a hand on one of your horns and it helps a little. So does the cold metal against your skin. This isn’t - it isn’t _fair_ , you already paid your dues and you’re going to die before Terezi or Vriska ever will and all you ever wanted was to dig up old things and make friends with ghosts. “Why?” you ask Terezi, buried in self-pity. “Why _me_? I already tried to kill her!”

“I was going to ask Sollux,” Terezi says. “To be honest, I thought you were already dead.”

“AA-” Sollux says. Terezi pokes him with her cane before he can get any further, with no difficulty in finding him.

“But I think it would be more fitting if it were you,” Terezi says, and drags her cane up Sollux’s chest to close his jaw with a click. “This is between us, yes?”

Sollux slaps her cane out of the way. “Do it yourself, TZ. Put down your own rabid bitch.”

Terezi turns her face away from the both of you, more because she doesn’t want you to look at her than vice-versa, you think. There’d certainly be no point in her trying to avert her gaze now. “I can’t. We...” She clutches her cane, searching for words, then shakes her head. “I can’t. I believe I’ve paid for my inability.”

You blink, then, and suddenly Terezi is - just a stupid six-sweep-old, playing at adult stakes. There’s a burden the size of murder on her shoulders, and she’ll be lucky to make it to Ascension the way she is now. Just like Tavros. Just like _you_. Except you’ve already decided that Vriska needs to be killed, fair on you or not, and this is just moving your schedule up a little.

You pick yourself up and dust yourself off - you’d say Sollux needs to vacuum more, but you doubt he knows what a vacuum is - then gingerly place a hand on Terezi’s shoulder. “Is she at her hive?”

“AA, no!” Sollux says, grabbing a handful of your shirt. “You only just woke up!”

You uncurl his hand from your shirt and lay it flat along your face. “Don’t worry,” you say, and close your eyes so you don’t have to look at the betrayal in his expression. “This time I’m playing for keeps.”

\--

Terezi flies you over on Pyralspite, so Vriska doesn’t feel your psi in the air and get warning that you’re alive. Usually flying is too noisy to worry about conversation, but Pyralspite protects you and Terezi from most of the wind, leaving the two of you in awkward silence. At least Terezi doesn’t seem worried about falling.

“I’m sorry,” she says, ten minutes into the flight. “About...” she gestures at you, and you can see the guilt weighing her down. Of course it would, for Terezi, who cut her sister’s arm off for her idea of justice.

“If one more person tells me that they’re sorry,” you inform her, “I am going to _break their arm_.”

She frowns a little, at that. It’s obvious that every expression hurts her, burnt to a crisp as she is, but there isn’t a force in the world that could make Terezi not use her expressions to their utmost, whether she genuinely means them or not. “You’re not upset?”

You let your head thud against your knees before taking a deep breath and sitting up again. “Us robots don’t get upset. Beep, boop.”

“Ah,” Terezi says. She’s sitting stick-straight compared to your slouch, but you don’t know if that’s the sunburn or just her. “Which makes your decision to break someone’s arm completely logical and unaffected by the troll disease known as emotion.”

“Whirr, clank,” you say. Terezi’s mouth crinkles upwards slightly.

Then you remember that you’re on your way to kill Vriska, and Terezi remembers too, and your hilarious robot antics aren’t enough to bridge the gap of imminent murder, no matter how justified it might be.

“How-” Terezi’s voice catches in her throat, and she tries again. “How are you going to-?”

You fold your hands under your armpits and hunch in. “However I can, provided you don’t interfere.”

“I’m-”

“Blind,” you say, flatly. “But not as weak as you’re pretending. I FLARPed with you every week for a sweep straight, Terezi, you’re not bullshitting me.”

“Ah,” Terezi says, and lays a hand on Pyralspite’s shoulder. “Mom put a little knowledge of how to use my other senses in my head. I’m still adjusting.” She scratches Pyralspite’s shoulder and says, “Unlike you, I know exactly how many trolls Vriska has killed. It was always to keep her lusus alive, before now. With Tavros...” She shakes her head. “She made me promise that I’d never despise her for what she did out of necessity when we first met. Begged me not to leave her all on her own with blood on her hands.” She pushes her glasses up her nose. “So I won’t.”

Her matter-of-fact words chill you, despite everything. “You don’t think there’s another way?”

“I tried the other way.” You shudder, and Terezi nods, ignoring the fact that she shouldn’t have been able to tell. “You knew I wasn’t helpless. I know Vriska’s going to destroy everyone she cares about to get what she wants, because that’s what she _does_ , when she’s not stopped.” Teal leaks out from behind Terezi’s glasses, and you realise with horror that Terezi Pyrope is _crying_ , and it’s probably not just to pull your strings. “I’m so _tired_ of being the one who has to stop her,” she says, and tries to pat her face dry with her sleeve. “I can’t always be there,” she continues, although it’s more like she’s trying to convince herself than you. Her voice gets more and more of a hysterical edge as she keeps trying. “And I can’t leave her on her own, and nobody else knows how to handle her so they’d make it _worse-_ ” She gives up on her sleeve, picks her shirt off her belly and buries her face in it, glasses and all.

You don’t know exactly what to do, but you’ve seen Sollux screaming at himself when a piece of code goes awry, even when he’s not to blame - _especially_ when he’s not to blame - and this breakdown seems similar, so you crawl over Pyralspite’s back and carefully place an arm around Terezi’s shoulders, mindful of her burn.

She leans into your shoulder and screams. You know how she feels, so you let her. Vriska might have fucked up your body, but she hasn’t gouged out your soul like she has Terezi’s, or Tavros’.

You guess you should count yourself lucky that you are not beloved by Vriska Serket.

\--

You’ve been by Vriska’s hive before, though never close enough to really count. It’s just as spooky up close as it is at a distance, and Terezi leads you in a wide berth around the canyon it’s perched over. You realise why, when you see spindly white legs coming out of a crevice. Vriska’s lusus is horrific enough in the telling that you have no desire to look at it any closer. Even its legs are sending shivers down what’s left of your back.

“If she sees me, she’ll just mind-control me,” you say to Terezi. There’s not exactly much cover, unless you want to hide under the giant, troll-eating spider.

Terezi walks up to Vriska’s door, then feels along the wall. It turns away in a sharp angle, but not sharp enough to hide you completely, but she points and says, “Stand here,” nonetheless. You do as she says and figure, if the worst comes to the worst, Terezi will hopefully smack Vriska until she drops control.

Terezi - slight, burn-ridden, blinded Terezi - presses the doorbell with the head of her cane, exuding an aura of calm so powerful that Sollux’s fear of you getting sold out comes back to haunt you. Before it can take root, Vriska throws the door open - and you realise that Terezi has somehow positioned you exactly so that you’ll be hidden by the door. If you tilt your head a little, you can see through the crack between door and frame.

“Pyrope!” Vriska says. She gestures so expansively with one hand that you almost don’t realise she really is lacking the other one; blood has soaked that side of her shirt stiff, although it looks like she’s cauterised the wound since. Not changed her shirt, of course, Vriska is too _lucky_ for infections. “To what do I owe the honour?” When Terezi doesn’t say anything, Vriska bares her teeth. “Don’t worry! I’m _‘armless_.”

Terezi inclines her head. “And I suppose I’m blind to your faults?”

Vriska snatches Terezi’s glasses off with one hand. Terezi stares at her patiently.

“Cool,” Vriska finally says, and steps back out of your sight, into her house. “You coming in or what, Redglare?”

Terezi moves so fast that, even if you weren’t watching through a crack in the door, you’d have had trouble following her. One moment she’s standing there, a genial mask plastered over her features, the next she’s hauling Vriska out of her hive with a sword around her neck, the edge biting into her skin as she struggles to keep pace and not trip over.

“Scourge Sisters, huh?” Vriska snarls, trying to get her hand under the blade to lever it away from her neck.

Terezi kicks Vriska’s legs out from under her and follows her down, straddling Vriska’s back with the sword now a bar across the back of her neck. “Remember when we were three, Vriska, and none of your stupid traps worked anymore, and lowbloods never came this way anymore, and your lusus was dying?” She presses down on the blade, and Vriska yelps. “Your lusus wanted you to be _so_ smart and _so_ strong and it wasn’t _fair_ that she was starving because you were a dumb brat!”

“Fuck _you_ , Pyrope, you’re the one who chopped my arm off!” Vriska tries to roll, to throw Terezi off, but Terezi yanks her remaining arm behind her back and sends her sprawling face-first back into the dirt.

“You don’t do _anything_ without a reason,” Terezi says, her chest heaving, her hair everywhere and dust-brown. “You’re breaking apart the FLARP connections for a reason, you tried to kill Megido and Nitram _for a reason_ , and it wasn’t to feed your bedamned fucking lusus, Vriska!” Her voice softens. “You wouldn’t have blinded me without a reason.”

Vriska stays silent, her breath blowing dirt into her eyes. Terezi gasps for air like she’s run a marathon. And you flatten yourself against the wall and try not to breathe at all, because this argument feels too personal to intrude on, even if you came here for that very purpose.

“You won’t kill me,” Vriska says, finally. “You’re my _sister_. I lost my temper, bad things happened, lesson fucking learned, Terezi. Let me up.”

Terezi sighs from the bottom of her lungs. “Three promises, when we were three. Only for your lusus, only in a fair match, and you would never lie to me.” Before Vriska can say anything, she whips her sword back and reverses her strike, smashing the hilt into Vriska’s temple.

You take one cautious step out, then another, as Terezi climbs to her feet, then drops the sword. It clatters against the hard ground. When it stops, Terezi looks in your direction and says, “I gave her a chance.”

Vriska is sprawled over the ground like - well, like one of her victims, and your fingers itch with the urge to crush her where she lies. You could do it. Just because you never have doesn’t mean you never could.

“She didn’t tell me,” Terezi says, and for all that her eyes can’t really go glassy anymore, the tone of shock setting in is still imminent in her voice. “She didn’t tell _me_.”

“Walk away, Terezi,” you say, and bring your power crackling around you. For a moment, you almost feel like your old self, but your power refracts strangely off your chassis and breaks apart in your hands, and you let it fizzle out before it does something you don’t intend for it to do.

“I can’t,” Terezi says, miserably. She takes two steps back and then stops, caught by Vriska’s gravity. “I can’t kill her and I can’t let her go and I know that she’s going to tear everything apart and _I can’t fix it_.”

You stare at your hands, then let them drop without pushing out more psi. You only woke up in this situation yesterday and you’re already sick of it. “Can we just... stop her?”

Terezi laughs, hollowly.

“No, you said-” you point at Terezi and squint, because squinting makes remembering easier. “You said this is between us.” You stare down at Vriska, and curl your hands into fists. “What if we take us away?”

“Her plan,” Terezi says, but her voice lacks any argument. “She didn’t tell me.”

“Fuck her plan,” you snap. “Fuck her plan, fuck her luck, and fuck _her_ , Terezi.” You almost tell Terezi that Vriska is a liar and has been lying to her for years, given the number of angry ghosts that never died in a fair fight and still wanted a piece of Vriska Serket. “I challenged her before and told her to step off, after what she did to Tav, and all we got was _this_.” You nudge Vriska’s prone form with a foot.

“So what do we do?” Terezi asks, a little colour coming back into her voice. “Give her a challenge and she’ll come after us, give her capitulation and she’ll come after us.”

_And she cheats on bargains_ , you add, silently. But now you know what hurts her, thanks to Terezi.

\--

There are certain truths about yourself that you have to face. You are not nice. You are not kind. And were you a tad less weary, you probably would have crushed Vriska into a paste so fine that grubjelly manufacturors would have been envious.

Terezi watches you, inasmuch as she can. “She’ll come after you for this,” she says, leaning on her cane.

“She thinks I’m dead,” you reply, and raise your arms. You don’t _have_ to use physical gestures to channel psi, but it makes it a lot easier. “This is my spooky ghost revenge. Maybe I’ll have to worry in a season or two, but by then I’ll have a lot of compelling reasons for her to not murder me.” _Hopefully_ , you add, in your head. If Feferi can put her money where her mouth is.

You grab at the air and pull. With an immense roar, the side of Vriska’s canyon caves in, on top of her lusus, leaving the spider trapped and bleeding out. You are not nice, you are not kind, and you almost think killing Vriska would have been the better action. She stirs at your feet, and you try to think of a message to carve into the rock in front of her.

y0ure n0t al0ne

Let her take it as she will.

\--

_But I won't save you  
I won't save you_


End file.
